Killing Time With Tower Defence

It has recently come to my attention that Bloons Tower Defence (Bloons), an old browser based Tower Defence (TD) game is currently in its 5th iteration: Bloons 5. If any of you happen to follow the series, then you'll know that I've been living under a rock since the game’s been available since 2011. In any case, I gave it a whirl and it's pretty fun. In fact, I recommend trying it if only to bring back the fond memories of late 2007 when the original was released.

Bloons was and still is a very competent TD. It's hard to say what sort of additions they've made to the game over the years other than graphics, but when you have a winning formula, why deviate? However, if you really want to sink your teeth into a great TD, then I would have a gander at a couple of these!

PixelJunk Monsters

Starting off strong, PixelJunk Monsters is easily one of my favourite TD games, not to mention a very strong PSN title. The PixelJunk series has a great deal of charm. The incredible art and fantastic music really go a long way, and Monsters had it all in droves.

In Monsters, you couldn't place your towers anywhere you wanted. Each level was a sort of forest and the player was able to replace all the trees with towers. It was a solid TD formula (one which is employed by many a game) but what brought it a step further was the fact that you could play 2-player co-op, which is always welcome. You each had your own money bag to make towers with, so you had to decide who picked up what cash. As with many other TDs, you're able to upgrade your towers. As your towers kill enemies, they gain experience and one way to increase the experience faster was by having your avatar dance on a tower. The longer you dance the more exp the tower gain and, if you were playing co-op, you could both dance on the same tower. All very cool.  Monsters' was originally only available on the PS3, but it's since been released on Steam.

Kingdom Rush

Kingdom Rush has only been around for a few years now and it started off as a browser game over at Armor Games, but has actually branched out and is available on Steam as well as on mobile devices (Bloons 5 is also available on your phone of choice). One really cool feature about this TD that sets it apart from the other Browser based TDs out there is that it has a little story—which you can save and continue on later—along with a bunch of unlocks. Most browser based TDs are only mission based, which can get bland when every game is doing it.

Kingdom Rush is similar to Monsters in the way the towers are set up: You can only place them in pre determined spots on the map. The cool thing though is you don't build towers, but barracks that little guys come out of. You can get knights, archers, mages or artillery. Kingdom Rush is not only a good flash TD game, it is one of the better Flash games out there in general.

Warcraft 3 TD

If you every played Warcraft 3, then at some point in time you must have downloaded some of those modded multiplayer maps. They had a ton of them, and while I was never a huge fan of the adventure type ones, I sure did play a ton of the TD mods. The best part about some of the mods was that they used all kinds of random themes. Some of my favourites were the South Park and Pokemon TD mods. You get to choose a character, each having their own towers and then you had to face waves and waves of enemies.

Unlike the previous 2 TDs I’ve selected, in a Warcraft TD you can place your towers anywhere on the map. The main strategy employed by everyone was to maze. The term is pretty self-explanatory: The reason you do it is so that your enemies will go back and forth along the maze constantly getting hit by the same towers, thus maximizing their efficiency.

Warcraft TDs are all played  in multiplayer mode and trust me when I say you better be at least 4 people or you will get murdered. Even being 4 people is a little light, but at least it's still doable; there are just so many enemies. Normally the waves are pretty manageable, especially if you set up your maze properly, but then come the flying enemies. They go straight over your beautiful maze and take away all your lives. Best strategy is to remember to include some stronger towers early on instead of just growing your maze too fast with in-expensive and weak towers.

Final Thoughts

So there you have it, my short  list of TDs that I have sunk way too many hours into. I think I've beaten 1 Warcraft TD in my entire life, and we stayed up till 3-4 in the morning just to do it... We even got Rick Rolled by one of the maps... it was funny, because we didn't know you could run music videos in Warcraft, but still... No one likes getting Rick Rolled.